Big Enterprises are getting bigger on Linux, according to survey

"The extent of Linux adoption among the world’s largest enterprises continues to grow", according to the 2013 Enterprise End User Report, recently published. The survey analyzed organizations with sales of 500 million, and/or 500+ employees. It is important to note the survey was conducted by the Linux Foundation's End User Council, and thus cannot be considered an unbiased survey. However, this survey was perfomed over multiple years, and it is interesting to see the trends and responses from this survey group. It is also interesting to note that other press releases can be found from IDC that discuss double digit Linux growth, so these findings can help shape the overall market picture, from the eyes of the Linux love group. Some of the key findings from the report include the following:

Enterprise Linux use continues to have strong growth

Dramatic increase for Linux use in mission-critical workloads ( including in the cloud)

Finding Linux talent is a growing concern

Enterprise Linux use continues to have strong growth

For those surveyed, 82% plan to purchase additional Linux Servers in the next 12 months, compared to less than 30% purchasing additional Windows licenses. It's hard to read to much into this number given these are Linux Foundation participants, other than to say for these users they are happy with Linux and continue to make it a bigger part of their infrastructure.

Dramatic increase for Linux use in mission-critical workloads

This same group surveyed 2 years ago reported they use Linux in 60% of their mission-critical workloads. Last year, that jumped to 69%. This year it increased again to 73% using Linux for mission critical workloads. The survey expounds on this by saying,

"This trend is mirrored by the responses to our question about which platforms organizations primarily use for deploying and developing enterprise applications. The responses this year were 77 percent for deploying and 72 percent for developing enterprise apps on Linux; these numbers have been steadily increasing at the expense of Windows and UNIX over the last three years." The survey also goes into some detail about Linux adoption in the cloud, and how 74% of this group use Linux cloud deployments versus 17% using Windows in the cloud.

Another key point in the survey describes the "why" of Linux adoption, stating "The top three drivers for adopting Linux use are its feature set (75 percent), lower TCO (71 percent) and security (69 percent). At the same time, management’s view of Linux has remained consistently positive, with a reported 95 percent viewing the platform as equally or more strategic to the organization every year we have conducted the survey."

Finding Linux talent is a growing concern

The survey reports that inhibitors of Linux adoption including: driver availbility, lack of features, and interoperability have all plummeted, but a growing concern arises over qualified Linux talent. Issues with finding talent to support Linux have grown 11 percent since last year. The survey also mentiones that users contributing to the enterprise kernel have risen 8 percent in the last two years.

In summary this survey will give you a veiw of Linux growth from the eyes of the Linux Foundation users.The survey details how Linux has grown up over time to handle mission critical workloads, and cloud computing workloads of the future, and touches on some comparisons against Microsoft Windows servers. The survey findings can be found at - https://www.linux.com/publications/2013-enterprise-end-user-report.